hay rack design

[Andy Carson]

I have decided to feed my oxen outside of thier run-in this coming fall/winter. They just make such a mess in the winter when they can stand, eat and drink all in one place. Anyway, I want to build a hay rack/feeder of some sort so they make the best use of thier hay ouside. From a quick look, it seems that these feeders can be very complex or very simply and I am trying to figure out what features I want in mine and how important these factors are. Here are the features I am thinking about. If any of you all use hay racks fior your oxen, please let me know which of these features you really appreciate in your designs. I am not looking to make the best hay rack that ever existed, just something that is realtively easy to make and cuts down on hay waste as much as is convenient.

1) Keeping cattle from trampling hay
-I am convinced this is important

2) Entrances that prevent cattle from dragging mouthfuls of hay out of the rack to be trampled
-I am unsure if this is a significant source of hay waste. One of my oxen does this, the other doesn’t.

3) Elevating hay off the ground to prevent mixing with mud, mold growth, and subsequent spoilage
-I am attracted to this, but I seem many designs that do not do this, which makes me wonder if it’s really that important

4) Protecting hay from rain and/or snowfall
-I think this is probably NOT worth the effort of a roof, but am curious what others do

5) Design that allows different classes of cattle to feed from the same feeder without “bullying”
-Is this a reasonable goal? Perhaps I ought to plan on feeding calves thier hay separately until they are big. I was hoping to feed hay together and creep feed grain to the calves.

6) Portability (with or without disassembly)
-I want to be able to move this around my sacrifice area so as to distribute traffick, etc. Again, I am not sure how important this feature is, but see many designs that do this, and am curious if others like this system.

7) Lorn horn compatibilty
-I have read that oxen with long horns learn to weave them through small holes in hay racks. I am only partly comfortable with asking them to do this all the time, though. I worry that they could get hung up sometime even thoguht the odds seem to be low. I also worry that lower ranking cattle less interested in eating as this “weaving” take a while and while they are “weaving” they are vulnerable to bullying from others.

I appreciate any thoughts and experiences you all have on hay rack designs for oxen or cattle in general. Please share the design and what you like and don’t like about it.

[Tim Harrigan]

Andy, try this link to some work I did a few years ago with some colleagues in Animal Science.

http://www.animal-science.org/content/81/1/109.full.pdf

If the link does not work then search for:

Large round bale feeder design affects hay utilization and beef cow behavior
D. D. Buskirk, A. J. Zanella, T. M. Harrigan, J. L. Van Lente, L. M. Gnagey and M. J. Kaercher.

Most of the questions you have were at least partially evaluated in this work with beef cows. We did not get at the issue of portability because we were evaluating round bale feeders. The bullying issue was addressed pretty well and with circular bale feeders with a small number of cattle it will not be a problem in most cases. Horns are not a problem, but feeders with angled head gates are more effective than vertical head gates at preventing feeding losses from entering and exiting the feeder. In the case of calves with older cattle, they will quickly understand the social order and bullying is unlikely to occur at a circular feeder. Not so at a linear feed bunk. It has a lot to do with their vision and an ability to keep an eye on the boss.

I have some plans for a portable, covered, bunk-type wooden feeder if you want to see it, but I would not generally recommend a bunk-type feeder.

A few minutes later…
Andy, I just remembered there is an error in the caption of the photo showing the feeders we evaluated. A and B are reversed, the correct description should be (A) Cone feeder (B) Ring feeder rather than this one below from the paper.

Figure 1. Round bale feeder types: (a) ring, (b) cone, (c) trailer, and (d) cradle.

[Andy Carson]

Fascinating stuff, Tim, and very unexpected (at least to me). I was indeed thinking of building a linear bunk and will now build a circular (probably hexagonal) one instead.

Based on this paper, I have a greater understanding of why one of my oxen (the lower ranking one) tends to go in grab hay, pulls out, and wastes some hay. I had been using a linear feed bunk. It makes a lot of sense too that I would only have one ox that enters and exits, while the dominant ox just bellies up and chows down.

The head position aspect is interesting as well. There has to be loss associated with letting the hay rest on moist ground, but there are also losses from forcing cattle to feed in an unnatural “heads-up” position that seem to rival these losses. I would have never guessed that. I think that if I elevate the hay off the ground, I need to make sure it’s only a few inches.

Interesting stuff, and suprizing. It is good to rethink some basic assumptions.

PS. When I was worrying about bullying, my first thought was to make the linear bunk longer. In light of this paper and subsequent explainations, this would have likely not helped much (and might have hurt). Extending a linear bunk may have simply given space for the “bully” to hide in where he could feed comfortably and be out of the direct sight his “victims”.

[Tim Harrigan]

Yes, it is interesting, and it makes sense when you think about what happens around the feeder. One advantage with round feeders is they are easy to move around. If you move them around your pasture in a checker board pattern you can do a pretty good job of minimizing damage from treading, smothering of forage from wasted hay, and do a good job of distributing nutrients throughout the pasture.

It was interesting watching the video of the feeder interactions. Sometimes, with a linear feeder, the boss cow would start at one end and clear the entire feed bunk out from one end to the other. Just reminding the others who the boss was, I guess.

[Andy Carson]

Thinking about this more, I bet these lessons would apply to feeders/bunks designed to feed grain as well. IE, circular feeders in open areas might allow more undisturbed feeding of lower ranking cattle than linear bunks. The grain would have to be spread around a circle widely enough that one animal couldn’t access and guard the center. It would take alot of grain to fill a hay ring, but if the grain holder was shaped like a wide half donut (or a tractor tire cut in half), a relatively small amount of grain could be spread in a circle for all animals to access without bullying. Alternatively, one could simply hang buckets on the inside of a hay ring. Has anyone seen something like this?

[Vicki]

Good stuff in the link!

About covering: I’ve found that large round bales don’t get eaten quickly enough by the oxen to avoid getting soaked and yucky or frozen in our winters. So a simple roof is worth it, in my experience. They will eat more when it it stays dry, and I can fork up fallen dry waste to use as bedding in the sheds.

[karl t pfister]

I’m not an ox man ,But my horse round bale feeding system is a 10×10 simple shed with round bale feeders bolted to the outside,and hatches to fork the hay out ,and keep the horses from self serving.

Salad bar on 3 sides the 4th for loading r bales .I put wood chips around ,drier and less stones with spring clean up

[Tim Harrigan]

http://jas.fass.org/content/90/3/1047.full.pdf+html

Andy, not sure if you followed the link indicating more recent papers that cited our work, but here is a fairly recent JAS article evaluating round bale feeders with horses and hay feeding economics.

[Andy Carson]

Interesting. Restricting the bite size of animals with nets or bars seems to be an important feature with horse feeders. I could see that this could be beneficial for cattle too, although I would guess that the hole size/bar width would need to be somewhat larger for cattle due to a different mouth structure that seems less able to act as “treezers” to extract hay from small holes. Forcing cattle to take smaller bites could have positive effects beyond the hay wasting aspect in that hay consumption could be spread out over a long time, which would make intake more uniform and possibly reduce apparent hunger, boredom, and destructive behaviors. This could be very useful esp for mature oxen who are limit fed. I think this is a feature I will incorporate as well.

[Andy Carson]

I made a new hay rack and have been using it. This is a square design with 3 feed holes per side. It has a 6×6 floor to keep the hay off the ground and prevent trampling. It doesn’t have a roof, but I limit feed and the hay only sits in the rack for a matter of hours before it’s eaten. Despite all the design concerns we have discussed, my biggest design challenge was the goats (both large and pygmy) that I keep in with the cattle in the winter. I had to create a hay rack that would allow mature cattles heads in while not allowing pygmy goats in. The goats like to climb on the hay, and poop pee and trample it to the point that even cattle won’t eat it. The pygmies are about the size of an oxs head, so it was a bit of a design challenge. The solution I came up with was to raise the head holes far enough off the ground that the pygmies would have to jump to get through them. This alone wasn’t a complete solution, as goats can jump very well (even through small spaces). So, I added some fiberglass rods in a tight V shape to restrict the feed holes. They are stiff enough that small goats cannot jump through them, but flexible enough that large animals can push them to the side while feeding. The system seems to work well. Also, as you can see in the second photo, the feeder is portable, which I think is going to be very nice.

[IMG]http://i1264.photobucket.com/albums/jj493/countymouse/bth_feeder.jpg?t=1354286066[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i1264.photobucket.com/albums/jj493/countymouse/bth_hauling.jpg?t=1354286062[/IMG]

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